Building a Brilliant (and Future-Proof) Service Desk

Intelligent Customer Engagement Series [Ep.1] AI Drives Measurable Success in Customer Engagement

Nearly 50% more companies are using or planning to use AI in their customer engagement initiatives.
Nemertes recently studied how 518 companies are using AI and analytics to improve their customer experiences. This webinar details:
• how these companies use AI
• what measurable improvements resulted.

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit US Government Solutions Special Interest Group.

Objective: Learn how to leverage the Cloud for realistic Performance Testing.

Cloud Burst, a Micro Focus performance testing solution, is the only product on the market today that can automatically support your scalable performance testing needs in the Government FedRAMP Cloud environments.

See how your testing can be hosted in a Private Secure Gov Cloud environment to automatically execute performance or stress test completely within the Gov Cloud environments, or from various cloud regions around the world, simulating real user’s experience during the performance test.

Watch the live demo running in the FedRAMP Gov Cloud regions to see how easy, quickly and affordably you can plan, design and execute your application performance testing requirements.

This offering with flexible pricing, allows clients to leverage their investment in the Micro Focus ADM software solutions, increasing their ROI, while reducing risk and adding value to their organization’s internal and external users.

The SNIA EMEA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) will return to Tel Aviv in early February 2020.

SDC EMEA is organised by SNIA, the non-profit industry association responsible for data storage standards and education, and the conference is designed to provide an open and independent platform for technical education and knowledge sharing amongst the local storage development community.

SDC is built by developers – for developers.

This session will offer a preview of what is planned for the 2020 agenda ahead of the call for presentations and will also give potential sponsors the information they need to be able to budget for their participation in the event. If you have attended previously as a delegate, this is a great opportunity to learn more about how you can raise your profile as a speaker or get your company involved as a sponsor. There will be time allocated during the webcast to ask questions about the options available. Companies who have significant storage development teams will learn why this conference is valuable to the local technical community and why they should be directly engaged.

There are tasks being performed and called “IT problem management” at every type and size of business. But most of those fall short of the goals of true, proactive problem management – to resolve incidents, identify and address their root causes, and reduce occurrence and recurrence of incidents and problems.

How best to ensure your IT people, processes, and technologies are adequately prepared to deliver proactive problem management?

Learn more from experienced experts at this informative, valuable one-hour webinar.

Speakers:

• Bill Talbot – trusted adviser to more than 150 companies over more than 20 years, focused on IT asset management (ITAM)
• Mike Bombard – Chief Operating Officer, Virima Technologies
• Moderator: Ryan Schmierer, a recognized industry thought leader in the areas of Digital Transformation, IT Strategy, Service Management and Operations.

If you are an IT decision maker, or a change, configuration, or incident manager, you’ll want to attend this event. Bring your questions and experiences for a spirited discussion, and leave with ideas you can use.

Does your problem management practice resemble a disorganised filing cabinet, with a mess of potential problems, mixed in with complicated incident and some service improvement suggestions thrown in for good measure? Don’t worry, you are not alone, and with some good assessment and planning activities, a helping of patience and an analytical mindset you can work your way out of what seems like a dire situation.

Problem management is an ITSM practice that has the potential to pay huge dividends when it is managed properly, you can get a rapid return on investment by concentrating on removing the biggest pain points for the organisation. Learn how to make incremental improvements in your problem management practice that will really make a difference to the value of service management in your organisation.

HDI conducts comprehensive annual research on almost every aspect of the service desk, from hiring, staffing, and salaries to metrics, frameworks, and technologies. This webinar will explore not only the statistics around the service desk, but what they mean in terms of industry trends and changes. How successful has the “do more with less” approach been? Are service desks hiring, or reducing staff? Is the workload shrinking or growing? What are the top metrics being gathered, and what do they mean?

Attendees will learn:

- What do service desks consider “must-have” technologies for supporting customers/users?
- What contact channels are being used by customers to get support and request services?
- What percentage of organizations are hiring for expansion of the service desk?
- Which frameworks and methodologies are being used?
- What are some areas where improvement is needed?


HDI's 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Roy Atkinson is one of the top influencers in the service and support industry. His blogs, presentations, research reports, white papers, keynotes, and webinars have gained him an international reputation. In his role as senior writer/analyst, he acts as HDI's in-house subject matter expert, bringing his years of experience to the community. He holds a master’s certificate in advanced management strategy from Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, and he is a certified HDI Support Center Manager.

Follow him on Twitter @RoyAtkinson

From the impact of automation to the rise of self-service, the service desk is changing as fast as customer expectations.

Join ITSM professionals as they discuss the State of the Service Desk in 2019 - including where it's headed, how to accurately measure performance and where investment should be focused to maximise employee experience.

Panelists include:
Roy Atkinson, Sr. Writer/Analyst | HDI and ICMI | InformaTech
Barclay Rae, Consultant and Author, Service Management, at Barclay Rae Consulting Ltd.

With continued automation of routine tasks, decline of the break fix model, and eradication of technical debt, what will a future service desk look like? Is there a need for service desks at all? In fact there is still continued growth in this areas – both in the vendor market and in the recruitment of service desk people. What is the essence of the work and value delivered that constantly seems to defy the industry predictions?

This session looks at the key elements that make up the human and business side of service desks – and why we will always need them (for some time at least..)

Our industry is experiencing massive change in the shape of the 4th Industrial Revolution. With it come the challenges of new business and engagement models, the exploitation of technology for competitive gain and the ongoing pressure of speed to market. The question is, are service management practices sufficient to support digital enabled businesses?

In this session,Simon and Michelle will explore the role of some of the latest best and enabling practices particularly ITIL 4, DevOps, Agile, SIAM and VeriSM. They will consider the future of service management, and the promises made by the emerging practices within our industry and consider their ability to support this digitised and frenetic environment.

If we didn’t have IT service management, we’d be in a right mess. But how do you identify and articulate the benefits of ITSM in terms that business people understand?

Starting with familiar ITSM notions such as utility and warranty, this talk explores how these relate to tangible business benefits such as more sales, higher prices, and lower costs and risks. Is ITSM just about keeping the lights on, and is it just as difficult to relate ITSM effort to business benefits as it is to say how much the cleaner’s broom contributed to last month‘s sales? This talk lets you decide for yourself.

The launch of ITIL 4 in March 2019 set out to reimagine IT Service Management as we head into 2020.

With some reviews wishing it had been more revolutionary, and some saying the updated framework has paced itself well with the progression in the industry, there has been much debate about its reception and impact.

Join this BrightTALK panel as Service Management experts discuss and debate the key updates and implementations you need to be aware of.

Enterprises have embraced cloud computing to unlock the opportunity offered by digital transformation. The cloud’s flexibility and agility enable enterprises to grow their business without borders and ensure productivity and efficiency.

While enterprise applications continue to migrate to the cloud, the necessary change in the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked. The hub-and-spoke WAN architecture that served the needs of the enterprise when applications were delivered from the datacenter, must evolve to serve the needs of the era of cloud applications. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is the WAN's response to this paradigm shift in application traffic to the cloud.

While SD-WAN has emerged as a key enabler of secure and seamless direct cloud application access with the benefits of transport independence, better security and path selection, it has brought into focus the importance of the transport underlay and the technology investment — both past and future — that an enterprise needs to consider before adopting SD-WAN.

This webinar spotlights two critical success factors for driving mainstream enterprise adoption of SD-WAN:

*Predictable and robust Internet connectivity
*Investment protection (of installed legacy network equipment or in new technology) as the WAN evolves to support applications delivered from the cloud.

Join us at this webinar as we make sense of SD-WAN adoption for your company.

The increased complexity of software and the need to keep up with fast-paced release cycles create new types of risk in the form of Software Exposure.

Join this interactive 1-2-1 discussion where product strategist and industry expert, Moshe Lerner will share insights including;

- Why you should consider software security as non-functional issue?
- What are the key challenges for managing software security in general and in DevOps environments?
- Best of breed vs Best of suite – Which is the right approach?
- The difference between interactive application security testing (IAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST)? Can IAST replace DAST?
- How to manage and reduce application security risk at scale

Moderated by Yotam Gutman, Founder & Community Manager, Cybersecurity Marketing Community

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit Testing Quality ALM Special Interest Group (SIG).

Join this webinar that will demonstrate how BNP Paribas started and performed evaluation of ALM Octane and is now using the tool to run complete agile testing lifecycles. The testing lifecycle will be presented as a live demo that follows Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) methodology and uses Gherkin notation for defining test suites.

The testing lifecycle starts with definition of requirements and user stories, heavily builds on test automation and advanced reporting, manages and synchronizes defects across tools, and feeds learnings from testing back into the requirements. It uses an integrated development and testing infrastructure including products like Confluence, Jira, Micro Focus ALM, Micro Focus ALM Octane, Jenkins, GIT, Cucumber, IntelliJ, TestCafe, and others.

BNP Paribas’s journey with agile test automation using ALM Octane started in 2017. The webinar presents in a nutshell how evaluation of ALM Octane was approached and conducted. It explains how new methods were introduced with the objective to leverage full tool functionality. The initiative has soon helped to increase testing efficiency and created important business value.

Webinar participants will learn:

• How BNP Paribas has conducted evaluation of ALM Octane
• Why ALM Octane is much more than just a successor of ALM/Quality Center
• How ALM Octane eases flexible management of its entire surrounding tool chain
• Why methodology like BDD shall precede tools, and not vice versa
• How Gherkin establishes a common language for the entire agile development lifecycle that helps integrating business, development, and testing
• How to use ALM Octane for pipeline management, reporting, defect synchronization, import of performance testing and BPT results, integration of in-sprint testing etc.

There are many challenges facing those who work in the ITSM field. It seems the most significant challenge is the constant changes, whether they are within the tools and customers you are supporting, the on-and-off boarding of employees, or the changes in your ITSM solution from upgrades or total replacement. The Micro Focus Adoption Readiness Tool can help you guard against these changes affecting your business.

• How to stop your knowledge leaving the building when the SME’s move on
• How to put together a knowledge repository and maintain your content efficiently
• How to create new content on the fly
• How to make this knowledge available for everyone at the point of need